Philosophical Ambitions Research Articles

PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIE OU STRUCTURALISME. FOUCAULT, DERRIDA ET LA SYNTHÈSE PASSIVE

Foucault and Derrida react in two different ways to the new paradigm imposed by structuralism. Foucault uses structuralism to overcome phenomenology, in fact structuralism shows the naivety of phenomenology, in its claim to rely on conscience to constitute meaning. Instead, Derrida on the contrary immediately nurtures a certain distrust of structuralism, especially in its philosophical ambitions and uses the resources of phenomenology to criticize it, showing the metaphysical implications operating in it. We want to show how this opposing position is generated by the specific way in which the two philosophers have responded to the open problems and bequeathed by Husserlian phenomenology. In particular, the theme of “passive genesis,” which was raised in the French debate by Tran-Duc-Thao and Merleau-Ponty, is central. In the first writings it emerges how Foucault has received Merleau-Ponty’s theses and it is precisely to overcome them that he inaugurates an archaeological analysis to try to distance himself from the normalizing anthropological discourse present in the passive synthesis. Derrida reads passive genesis in a radically different way from Merleau-Ponty (and therefore Foucault): the radical nature of Husserl’s phenomenology has opened a space to question the transcendental genesis of philosophical discourse and its possibility of transcending its historical, social and psychological genesis and therefore the sciences that preside over these dimensions. Consequently, showing the naivety of structuralism, Derrida’s research of the sixties is configured as post-structuralist.

Something Valid This Way Comes: A Study of Neologicism and Proof-Theoretic Validity

AbstractThe interplay of philosophical ambitions and technical reality have given birth to rich and interesting approaches to explain the oft-claimed special character of mathematical and logical knowledge. Two projects stand out both for their audacity and their innovativeness. These are logicism and proof-theoretic semantics. This dissertation contains three chapters exploring the limits of these two projects. In both cases I find the formal results offer a mixed blessing to the philosophical projects.Chapter 1. Is a logicist bound to the claim that as a matter of analytic truth there is an actual infinity of objects? If Hume’s Principle is analytic then in the standard setting the answer appears to be yes. Hodes’s work pointed to a way out by offering a modal picture in which only a potential infinity was posited. However, this project was abandoned due to apparent failures of cross-world predication. I re-explore this idea and discover that in the setting of the potential infinite one can interpret first-order Peano arithmetic, but not second-order Peano arithmetic. I conclude that in order for the logicist to weaken the metaphysically loaded claim of necessary actual infinities, they must also weaken the mathematics they recover.Chapter 2. There have been several recent results bringing into focus the super-intuitionistic nature of most notions of proof-theoretic validity. But there has been very little work evaluating the consequences of these results. In this chapter, I explore the question of whether these results undermine the claim that proof-theoretic validity shows us which inferences follow from the meaning of the connectives when defined by their introduction rules. It is argued that the super-intuitionistic inferences are valid due to the correspondence between the treatment of the atomic formulas and more complex formulas. And so the goals of proof-theoretic validity are not undermined.Chapter 3. Prawitz (1971) conjectured that proof-theoretic validity offers a semantics for intuitionistic logic. This conjecture has recently been proven false by Piecha and Schroeder-Heister (2019). This chapter resolves one of the questions left open by this recent result by showing the extensional alignment of proof-theoretic validity and general inquisitive logic. General inquisitive logic is a generalisation of inquisitive semantics, a uniform semantics for questions and assertions. The chapter further defines a notion of quasi-proof-theoretic validity by restricting proof-theoretic validity to allow double negation elimination for atomic formulas and proves the extensional alignment of quasi-proof-theoretic validity and inquisitive logic.Abstract prepared by Will Stafford extracted partially from the dissertation.E-mail: stafford@flu.cas.czURL: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33c6h00c

Konkrete Geschichtlichkeit?

Abstract This article reconstructs Herbert Marcuse’s first and widely ignored philosophical project, as set out in his texts published from 1928 to 1933. In these texts, Marcuse tried to put in dialogue ideas from Heidegger and Marx to articulate a dialectic phenomenology of historical existence. This attempt, of great originality and philosophical ambition, was marked by tensions arising from the peculiar status given to the ontology of historicity in a framework of thought that maintained strong links with Marx. By analysing this early philosophical project of one of the icons of the international student movement, theoretical tensions can be detected, which clarify the subsequent approach of this thinker as a member of the so-called Frankfurt School.

The Theodicy of Growth: John Rawls, Political Economy, and Reasonable Faith

Rediscovery of John Rawls's early interest in theology has recently prompted readings of his philosophical project as a secularized response to earlier theological questions. Intellectual historians have meanwhile begun to historicize Rawls's use of contemporary philosophical resources and his engagement with economic theory. In this article I argue that what held together Rawls's evolving interest in postwar political economy and his commitment to philosophy as reconciliation was his understanding of the need for secular theodicy. In placing Rawls in the intellectual context of a postwar political economy of growth as well as in relation to the history of political thought, including his reading of that history, I defend two claims. First, I argue that Rawls's philosophical ambition is best understood as providing a secular reconciliatory theodicy. Second, I suggest that Rawls's theodicy was initially rendered plausible by the economic background conditions of economic growth that were fractured and fragmented just as Rawls's book was published in 1971. This divergence between text and context helps to account for Rawls's peculiar reception and his own subsequent attempt to insist on the applicability of his theory under radically altered circumstances.

Elusive luck: Contextualist approach to the Gettier problem

Lewis' philosophical ambition to eradicate the skeptical threat towards infallibilism was the driving force behind his contextualist approach to knowledge. One of the discerning characteristics of his conversational contextualism is the claim that it can solve the Gettier problem. The first part of this paper will be directed towards explicating the arguments Lewis employed in reaching said solution. The second part will be concerned with Cohen?s critique of the proposed explanation. Cohen?s considerations result in an insight that contextualism does not have the adequate means to answer the Gettier challenge. Finally, I shall make an attempt at further motivating Cohen?s claim by investigating the essential component of Gettier cases - epistemic luck. This will be done by appealing to Pritchard?s concept of veritic epistemic luck. The author?s goal is to suggest that contextualist resources are neither suitable to solve nor exhaustively articulate the Gettier problem.

Political Ontogenesis: (Through) Affects (Towards) Becoming (And) Immanent Critique

Political Ontogenesis(Through) Affects (Towards) Becoming (And) Immanent Critique Denis Petrina The statement that ontology has been at the very core of philosophy may seem a truism. Even more so when we consider that Aristotle granted ontology the status of "first philosophy" (58/149), which means that the latter should concern itself primarily with the study of being—haplos—as a very peculiar form of being: being as being or being in itself. This set a course for the subsequent development of philosophical thought: since ancient times, philosophers have mainly been preoccupied with the "distillation" of being, the removal of its intrinsic antinomies, id est, the purification of being. In this paper, I attempt to diverge from this established route and question this unquestionable philosophical ambition to speak of ontology as a singular and universal theory of being. When reading Aristotle, Sergei Prozorov insightfully notes that the equation "ontology = first philosophy" disguises a not so readily apparent unsettling commonality between ontology and what he terms "political anthropology" (Prozorov, World 105), or what we may call ideology. Interestingly, idea is an invisible yet strong link that ties philosophy and ideology together. Plato, the first post-Socratic philosopher, placed idea—an idea(l) form, contraposed with imperfect materiality—at the heart of his philosophical system. Viewed from this perspective, the idea component in ideology can be described as an underlying form that shapes, unites, and holds its components together. Thus, translated into philosophical terms, ideology is nothing but (an) ontology. This brief genealogical inquiry allows us to acquire a different viewpoint, from which we can look at ontology in at least two ways. On the one hand, ontology qua ideology (and vice versa) presupposes the contextual and subjective nature of ontology: ontology is always a correlative of the subject, or, placed in a political context, of a group of subjects. On the other hand, politics is elevated to ontological status, which results in the legitimation of a certain political context, of the interests of a certain group of subjects, and thus, ultimately, of a certain sociopolitical status quo. Even at this stage, the attempt to conceptualize [End Page 83] ontology as pure, devoid of any supplements being, appears as a highly ideological enterprise that remains (or at least pretends to be) unaware of its own political implications. This relation is symmetric: ontology is as much politically oriented as politics is oriented ontologically. "What is being?"—a seemingly philosophical question ontology raises might be easily translated into a normative one, that is: "What ought being to be?". If this question is perceived as pertaining to life, the normative question might easily become biopolitical: "What ought being not to be?". Thus, ontology, allied with politics, reveals itself as an inherently political apparatus that, in a classical biopolitical manner, governs being—however, not at its material level, as it occurs in the field of politics—but, instead at a conceptual-perceptual level. Here, we should take the descriptor "conceptual" in all its seriousness. Even though the conceptual framing is immaterial, its power is material, or, even more precisely, more than material. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue, not only is any concept composed of a variety of heterogeneous (both material and immaterial) components—but, more importantly, it has a totalizing power over its components too (Deleuze, Guattari, Philosophy 15–16). In a similar vein, Michel Foucault maintains that a contemporary neoliberal regime is characterized by its alarmingly biopolitical goal of governing both individuals and populations (Foucault, Sexuality 141) through both material and discursive, or conceptual, means. To phrase it metaphorically, this resembles a game of mirrors: ontology reflects politics—and politics reflects ontology. Brian Massumi, reacting to this alarming symptom of the neoliberal regime, has coined the term "ontopower," a portmanteau combining "ontology" and "power." Massumi maintains that ontopower has a dual aim: not only does it endeavor to administer being, but it also controls and governs opportunities of it (Massumi, Ontopower vii). The next chapter will explore this new configuration, topology, and operative logic of power in more detail. ontopower (i): biopower The starting point for Massumi's conceptual operationalization of ontopower is Foucault's theoretical framing of the neoliberal or, alternatively...

The Specter of 1966, or Speculative Realism and the Phantom of Deconstruction

The Specter of 1966, or Speculative Realism and the Phantom of Deconstruction Peter Szendy Translated by Jacob Levi Certain events have become landmarks in the history of contemporary thought. The conference held in October 1966 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was one such event: with Derrida's contribution entitled "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," as Benoît Peeters writes in his biography of the philosopher, "the whole programme of deconstruction was set out" (Derrida: A Biography 168). Forty years later, in April 2007, a workshop held at Goldsmiths College in London brought together Quentin Meillassoux and three other participants under the banner of "speculative realism," an event whose impact has been compared with that of deconstruction at the Baltimore conference.1 This is one version or sequence of the legend, of the legendary history of contemporary French thought, according to which speculative realism would have recently taken over from poststructuralism. (Or, if we prefer to adopt the maximalist version of the legend: speculative realism has overtaken all post-Kantian philosophy and its supposed "correlationism.") [End Page 992] The problem with this legend is that, on closer inspection, it does not hold up. I am not talking about its media impact (which functions perfectly well), but rather about its philosophical mechanics. Because it seems to me that speculative realism is still haunted by the specter of many of the motifs and concepts of deconstruction, and it is far from even beginning to take this spectral presence into account. I will refer to three indications of this spectral proximity, which will serve as a preamble or program for a debate to come: first, the remarkable absence of Derrida's name in After Finitude (although the book covers the entire history of post-Kantian philosophy); second, the unsettling—and unquestioned—proximity of the notion of the archefossil (with which After Finitude opens) and the Derridean arche-trace; third, the notion of spectrality itself, which plays an important role not only in Derrida's thought, but also, surprisingly, in Meillassoux's own theologico-political speculations. 1 Derrida's name is an absence all the more glaring in After Finitude, as the book produces great movements of philosophical convergence or agglomeration that fall under the heading of the correlationism it intends to overcome. Thus we find matching pairs, such as the coupling of Wittgenstein and Heidegger under the banner of a correlationist discourse which "makes no positive pronouncements whatsoever about the absolute," and "confines itself to thinking the limits of thought" (41). But we also come across veritable lists inventorying different ways of "absolutizing the correlation" and indexing the different "forms of subjectivity" which are thereby "hypostatized" in the affirmation that "nothing can be unless it is some form of relation-to-the-world": "Hegelian Mind; Schopenhauer's Will; the Will (or Wills) to Power in Nietzsche; perception loaded with memory in Bergson; Deleuze's Life, etc." (37). But in these grand philosophical maneuvers where we see the style—and often the strength—of Meillassoux's thought, deconstruction is always missing. One could object that it is at least mentioned, and even explicitly confronted in some of his other texts. But then it is in contexts that are either far from the philosophical ambition or consistency of After Finitude (I am specifically thinking of an interview where we find the same sort of list or inventory, and the same sort of nomenclature which this time groups Freud, Marx, Derrida, and [End Page 993] Lacan)2; or, it is found in a manuscript whose status remains problematic (to the extent that, though unpublished, it has been widely circulated), namely, Meillassoux's doctoral thesis entitled L'Inexistence divine.3 2 I will return to the manuscript of L'Inexistence divine without delay. Despite its impublication (if I dare say so), it should be the point of departure for any attempt to explain the relation of spectral proximity connecting speculative realism (or "speculative materialism," as Meillassoux prefers to say4) and deconstruction. A spectrality whose second sign, indication, or symptom is the notion of the arche-fossil, which is central to After Finitude. Certainly, at first glance and despite the apparent...

Serious Literature

Serious Literature Catherine Keyser When I was thirteen years old, my dad expressed concern that, although I was a voracious reader, I wasn't interested in what he considered serious literature. We agreed upon a challenge: I would read Moby-Dick (his candidate for indispensable novel) if he would read Little Women (mine). When I tell this story to friends, I laugh about these incommensurate choices. Though Little Women clocks in at more than five hundred pages, it doesn't approach the physical heft of Moby-Dick—let alone its allegorical or philosophical ambitions. While Melville's leviathan may be an acquired taste, Little Women is compulsively readable; sentimental attachments fuel compelling plots about returning fathers, dying sisters, spurned suitors, and the like. By most lights, my father had the easy half of the bargain. I painstakingly chiseled my way through the marble immensity of Moby-Dick, while he sliced butter to enjoy with bread and tea in the company of the March sisters. Little did I realize then that by selecting Little Women as my literary classic I was setting a course that would define my scholarship and teaching. When I proudly claimed the March sisters and Louisa May Alcott over the homosocial crew of the Pequod and the abstruse and canonical Herman Melville, I was insisting on the significance of work considered too feminine, too domestic, too sentimental, too appealing to the child reader to be highbrow. Years before I read Janice Radway and Jane Tompkins, I registered instinctively that that way of defining canonicity and cultural value was derogating the experiences, narratives, and styles that spoke to me so intimately and compellingly. My choice reflected my nascent recognition that the stakes of criticism are political and that women—as authors and as literary characters—have often been exiled from the hallowed halls of seriousness while they cling to humor and hearth. Alcott takes up the question of seriousness in Little Women. The most memorable reflection on literary genres and their cultural worth comes when Professor Bhaer condemns the publication of "sensation stories," declaring that its moral effects are as deleterious as to "put poison in the sugar-plum, and let the small ones eat it" (280). Jo bends to his literary and moral judgment, concluding that "I'd better burn the house down . . . than let other people blow themselves up with my gunpowder" (280–81). These violent metaphors bode [End Page 117] ill for the prospect of women writers in the popular press. Less memorable but equally important in my view are Jo's subsequent attempts to reform her work. She decides to write "a tale which might have been more properly called an essay or a sermon, so intensely moral was it" (281). When she takes on this didactic voice, Jo feels physically constrained: "her lively fancy and girlish romance felt as ill at ease in the new style as she would have done masquerading in the stiff and cumbrous costume of the last century" (281). While on a superficial reading, it appears that Alcott agrees with Professor Bhaer's dire verdict, closer attention to Jo's subsequent experiments in seriousness reveals Alcott's investment in wit—in "lively fancy" and "girlish romance"—as a versatile and contemporary mode of expression. By contrast, moral seriousness, the "costume of the last century," would effectively corset Jo. Though the novel ends without Jo having yet written the book of her dreams, she speculates that the antics of "lively lads" (379) will enhance her work, much as their language infuses her style: "living among boys, I can't help using their expressions now and then" (380). Alcott claims boyish femininity (or feminine boyishness), humor, and childhood as tone and subject. Traditionally, each of these categories has been understood as a stage that must be outgrown. Feminist criticism questions the yardstick of seriousness as an arbiter of worth, just as Alcott embraces childishness as a form of creativity and generativity—one that escapes, if only in fleeting moments of pleasure, the didactic trajectories of normativity. [End Page 118] Catherine Keyser University of South Carolina Copyright © 2019 University of Nebraska Press

The Evaluation of Discovery: Models, Simulation and Search through “Big Data”

Abstract A central theme in western philosophy was to find formal methods that can reliably discover empirical relationships and their explanations from data assembled from experience. As a philosophical project, that ambition was abandoned in the 20th century and generally dismissed as impossible. It was replaced in philosophy by neo-Kantian efforts at reconstruction and justification, and in professional statistics by the more limited ambition to estimate a small number of parameters in pre-specified hypotheses. The influx of “big data” from climate science, neuropsychology, biology, astronomy and elsewhere implicitly called for a revival of the grander philosophical ambition. Search algorithms are meeting that call, but they pose a problem: how are their accuracies to be assessed in domains where experimentation is limited or impossible? Increasingly, the answer is through simulation of data from models of the kind of process in the domain. In some cases, these innovations require rethinking how the accuracy and informativeness of inference methods can be assessed. Focusing on causal inference, we give an example from neuroscience, but to show that the model/simulation strategy is not confined to causal inference, we also consider two classification problems from astrophysics: identifying exoplanets and identifying dark matter concentrations.

Ivan Turgenev and His Philosophical Ambitions

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883), one of the most prominent Russian writers and intellectuals. A great novelist, dramatist, short-story wri...

The People as a Natural Disaster: Redemptive Violence in Jacobin Political Thought

The trial and execution of Louis XVI served as a founding act of French republican democracy. It was also a scene of irregular justice: no legal warrants or procedural precedents existed for bringing a king to justice before the law. This essay describes how Jacobins crafted a new language of popular agency to overcome that obstacle—the language of redemptive violence. Although redemptive violence had roots in prerevolutionary notions of penal justice and social cohesion, its philosophical ambitions were revolutionary and modern. Analyzing that language illuminates how republican democracy weaponized a distinctive ideology of extralegal violence at its origins. It also helps explain redemptive violence's enduring appeal during and after the French Revolution.

The experimental and the empirical: Arne Naess' statistical approach to philosophy

ABSTRACTExperimental philosophy often draws its data from questionnaire-based surveys of ordinary intuitions. Its proponents are keen to identify antecedents in the work of philosophers who have referred to intuition and everyday understanding [e.g. Knobe, Joshua, and Shaun Nichols, ‘An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto’. In Experimental Philosophy, edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, 3–14. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007]. In this context, ‘Empirical Semantics’, pioneered by Arne Naess early in the twentieth century, offers striking parallels. Naess believed that much contemporary philosophy was unempirical because it made no reference to ordinary understanding or use of language. In response, he attempted large-scale studies of ordinary understanding of philosophically significant terms [e.g. Naess, Arne. ‘Truth’ as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers. Oslo: Jacob Dybwad, 1938]. This article will compare Empirical Semantics and experimental philosophy, and assess what such a comparison reveals that might not be apparent from a consideration of either in isolation. It will concentrate on two points of comparison: the wider philosophical ambitions of the two approaches, and the types of criticisms they have encountered. Naess was straightforwardly interested in folk intuitions as philosophical data, whereas many experimental philosophers are also interested in explaining the intuitions themselves. A comparison of the different types of criticism reveals attitudes to philosophical practice which have recurred across a time period of some eighty years, and those which are more specific to historical context.

The Fifth Antinomy: A Reading of Torture for a Post-Kantian Moral Philosophy

"Where is it decreed that enlightenment must be free of emotion? To me, the opposite seems to be true. Enlightenment can properly fulfill its task only if it sets to work with passion." - Améry, At the Mind's LimitsThis statement, which concludes the preface to the 1977 reissue of At the Mind’s Limits, conveys the philosophical ambition of the book: to advance the enlightenment project, while revising the way we understand this project. The idea, rejected here by Améry, that the enlightenment “must be free of emotion” owes most to its foremost proponent, Immanuel Kant. This paper picks up on this implicit allusion to Kant, and elaborates on Améry’s revision of the enlightenment by making the confrontation between them explicit.

Justice dans un monde de violence.

The question is: how shall we conceive the idea of justice in the world of violence of our time? It takes up the old symbol of justice: the scales that symbolise an equilibrium between different ambitions. The author traces this idea in Western philosophy since Plato and Aristotle through Kant to Rawls, Ricoeur and Delmas-Marty for whom it becomes the symbol of global justice. By using the wind rose as another symbol, Delmas-Marty expresses the ethical necessity of a global justice between the philosophical, legal, social and political ambitions that blow across our whole world. All these winds have their rights in globalization, but none of them have the right to dominate the others.

The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier

The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier

Thinking meat: On Gu Dexin’s May 2, 2009

Abstract In 2009, the reclusive artist Gu Dexin finally bid farewell to the art world after a decades-long career with a sweeping installation that centred on two declarations: ‘we have killed people’ and ‘we can go to heaven’. This work, May 2, 2009, recalls both phases of his career, including his early investment through collaborative projects in diagrammatic abstractions as well as his continuous sculptural practice, which often comprised accumulations of decaying organic matter. This article proposes to understand this final work – and, relatedly, his two bodies of work – as continuous rather than distinct, through the lens of meat as a form of thought, as a relation of predation or nutrition rather than an object. In Gu’s peculiar materialism, butchery functions as analysis and ingestion as synthesis, and then ultimately approaches a kind of rationalism. In this light, I end with a suggestion about the relevance of new strains of speculative materialism for a reappraisal of experimental artistic practices in China from the 1990s on with their philosophical ambitions in mind.

Explanation in Composition: Gertrude Stein and the Contingency of Inductive Reasoning

Gertrude Stein’s experimental and more widely-read poetry, fiction, and lectures participate in a philosophical conversation about explanation. Her novel Q.E.D ., her poem “An Elucidation,” and her lecture “Composition as Explanation,” show how Stein theorizes the possibility and the problems of explaining based on inductive reasoning. Stein endorses inductive reasoning, using facts alone, as the basis of an explanation, although she is also aware that eschewing deductive reference to laws or theories means that any resulting explanations are necessarily more subjective and therefore more contingent. Understanding Stein’s philosophical ambitions allows readers to clarify, although not solve, her notorious difficulty; Stein’s work is difficult because she is writing about a difficult philosophical problem: when and how subjective experience may justify an explanation.

‘vocal illyrian avowals’: Herbert Read and Abstract poetry

‘What is a Poem?’ Herbert Read asked at the close of his final volume of poetry, Collected Poems (1966). This question was to preside over the later years of his career as both a poet and a critic, and to reach its most intriguing conclusion in his often-overlooked poetry collection ‘Vocal Avowals’. First printed in 1959 in Encounter, Read revisited this sequence throughout the final decade of his life, revised and reprinted for the 1962 collection Worte sagen aus, and then as the final section in Read’s Collected Poems. Misidentified by critics as the invention of a ‘supremely subjective romanticism’, these poems were composed at a moment of great philosophical curiosity and artistic ambition. Through Read’s contribution to an evolving ‘language of non-vocal signs’, his vocalizations on behalf of abstract art and his vital and incessant experiment in the realm between poetry and painting, these poems were to contribute to a stirring of the ‘drift’ of modern poetry in post-war Britain.

BIOGRAFIA OU DECLARAÇÃO DE AMBIÇÃO FILOSÓFICA: COMO LER ECCE HOMO DE NIETZSCHE?

This article discusses the book Ecce homo, by Nietzsche, defending that the text is an interpretation of the philosopher himself on her own thought, not to give the book a sacred tone, nor to stress his biography, but affirming a dissonant thought that indicates his philosophical ambition. With no constraints, Nietzsche presents his conflicts, passions, deceptions, announcing a tragic dimension of life that is not guided by pessimism, but by happiness of living intensely, understanding suffering as one of the facets of life. His philosophy derives from a life demand, transfigured by an experience that promotes self cultivation and the possibility of “becoming what one really is” through the “applying” of one’s own genealogic method.

The Excursion: Life, Lives, and Writing

This essay aims to advance critical conversation about ways of reading The Excursion by proposing that, in twenty-first century, poem appears at its most provocative and rewarding when is read as life-writing: as a poem that tells stories of many lives, in order to raise questions about what an individual might mean, and what act of narrating might involve. (1) Such a reading is active, in sense best summarized by Sally Bushell: narrative should be responded to in complete isolation ... each demands to be re-read ... in light of what comes before and after it (Bushell 1). The need to consider multiple points-of-view results from very form of work, which appropriates genres of life-writing within framework of a or--to use Charles Lamb's term--conversational poem. (2) In this kind of reading, no subjectivity is privileged: not Poet's, and not even Wanderer's. Every narrative of a is explicitly or implicitly questioned, and even subverted, by other narratives that surround it. Recognizing centrality of life-writing in poem also develops a point first made by William Galperin: that Book I of poem already documents a between narrative and life that testifies to the inadequacy of narratives in general, and to very selfhood, which is neither so autonomous nor so authoritative as we may want to believe (37). Galperin argues that, as Wordsworth moved further away from visionary moment and its promise of reconciliation with an active universe, he was forced into questioning autonomy of poetic self, and an exploration of those sources of a poet's authority that might lie outside self. This move, by which Wordsworth voluntarily relinquishes stance of inspired son for a more relational one, that of a man among men, is figured in poem as Poet's resignation of self' (Galperin 33), yielding priority, for most of poem, to Wanderer, Solitary, and Pastor. The Excursion is life-writing in sense that dramatizes and debates question that is implicit in all biography and autobiography: how a person should live. It raises this question, not abstractly, but by locating in contemporary political and social context, in a Britain riven by political conflict and damaged both socially and economically by nearly two decades of war. Therefore, to recognize that a large proportion of poem is given to narratives of lives is not to propose a flight from history back into subjective. The dialogic structure, as Adam Potkay has argued, moves reader toward a project of knowing together (Potkay 170)--though an attentive reading of poem tends to reveal something rather different from ideal that Wordsworth longingly anticipated in Home at Grasmere-. true community, noblest Frame / Of many into one incorporate (Home at Grasmere 90 [MS B Reading Text, 11.819-820]). Hazlitt and Coleridge both believed that life-narratives were a digression from real aims of poem. Coleridge announced that The Excursion disappointed [his] expectations (Letters, 4:572-3), evidently because fell short of delivering ambitious philosophical poem he thought Wordsworth had planned. (3) Hazlitt was still more explicit about what he took to be discrepancy between philosophical ambitions and narrative method: We could have wished that our author had given to his work form of a didactic poem altogether, with only occasional digressions or allusions to particular instances. But he has chosen to encumber himself with a of narrative and description, which sometimes progress and effect of general reasoning, and which, instead of being inwoven with text, would have come in better in plain prose as notes at end of volume (Works, ed. Howe, 4:113). Hazlitt's impatience with load of narrative and description and his complaint that hinders . …